The Valley of a Thousand Haystacks

near Garrison, Montana

The thin vein of the Little Blackfoot slips among fields dotted with the old beaverslide hay stackers, bony lodgepole skeletons that still creak to work in this valley. Hay is loaded into carts from its swept windrows on the open palms of pitchforks. The shoulders of the horses haul the rake through the air, scaffolding shuddering in the autumn light & the fodder falls, released like a rib’s caged breath. Let us call this progress: the steady growing of the stack, like dough warm & rising in the field, a bond against cold, hunger, zephyr, rot’s black blooms—this banked seed of root & sun. Let us eat that bread in winter’s rooms.

The Coming of the Zebulon M. Pike, First Steamboat to Ascend the Missouri to St. Louis

1817

A blacksnake big around as a man’s wrist once ate three of papa’s pullets. One I watched it disgorge, slicked with the phlegm of the snake’s belly & smooth as the eggs it was meant to give us. The other two nestled there in the racer’s bulged coil. It fled from me, fat & slow, as the smoke that belches from the ship’s stacks moves in the heat, indolent, inevitable, bulbous with the tale of its arrival, with all the mail & its bright, round news. Strange, & slippery, that word from home might reach me now by breath alone.

Corrie Williamson is the author of Sweet Husk, winner of the 2014 Perugia Press Prize and a finalist for the Library of Virginia Literary Award. Her most recent work can be found in AGNI, 32 Poems, Willow Springs, and TriQuarterly. She lives in Helena, Montana.